Gaming industry banking on your 'casual' engagement

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, June 26, 2006

While pregnant with daughter Luna Smith-Fisher, Amie Fisher played a lot of casual online games to take her mind off of the nausea and achiness.

While pregnant with daughter Luna Smith-Fisher, Amie Fisher played a lot of casual online games to take her mind off of the nausea and achiness.

Photo: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Gaming industry banking on your 'casual' engagement

1 / 1

Back to Gallery

The blahs and bleechs of pregnancy had Amie Fisher firmly in their grip. Nausea. Achiness. Irritability. What she needed was relief. What she wanted was a break.

She found both.

The 31-year-old freelance Web designer from Burien said it was Alchemy that gave her some of the respite she was looking for. Not to mention Text Twist and Bejeweled.

These aren't the latest medical miracles or some exotic vitamin cure. They're very simple, very entertaining and very popular computer games.

"I was so tired and felt so brain-dead, they were a really easy way to distract myself," Fisher explained. "It was a nice way to check out for bit and not think about the fact I was feeling nauseous."

When most people think of computer and video games, they think of complex wonders of graphical and technological advancement -- games in which a young man hovering between the age of acne onset and college graduation sacrifices half his life to the glossy-eyed pursuit of gunning down virtual enemies in a button-mashing frenzy of gore.

But the games Fisher played while her belly was big with Baby and her brain a blur of hormones are something quite different. They're known as "casual games" with an emphasis on the casual. No blood. No guts. No problem.

Brainteasers and stress relievers, these games are instant distractions that take mere minutes to play and can be played on even the most basic home computer or even a cell phone. Their names offer a good indication of just how family friendly most of them are: Poppit! Word Whomp. Chuzzle. Zuma. Think: cute, friendly, approachable.

In the game Text Twist, for example, the computer gives the player a set of letters. The player must make as many words out of the letters as possible while trying to beat the clock. Bejeweled is a puzzle game in which the player is given a grid full of colored gems and must align like-colored stones in sets of three or more to score points.

"Casual games might be difficult to master, but they're easy to learn," said Chris Early, studio manager for Microsoft Casual Games. The company's site -- www.games.msn.com -- offers 300 card, puzzle, word and trivia games to the more than 13 million unique players who visit each month. "They provide something that pays off pretty quick. Your brain just says, 'I'm having fun.' "

Related Stories

Depending on whose statistics you believe, there are somewhere between 100 million and 400 million people now playing casual games around the globe. With more than half of those players of the female sex and two-thirds of them over 35, it's no wonder these humble bundles of bite-size entertainment are starting to draw unprecedented attention.

And Seattle has become a sort of ground zero for the business. It is home not only to some of the top development companies -- GameHouse, PopCap, Big Fish and Sandlot among them -- it's also a hub for some of the biggest casual game distributors and publishers out there, such as RealNetworks, Microsoft, Nintendo and Oberon Media.

Starting today, Seattle will play host to Casuality, a three-day casual gaming conference expected to draw some of the biggest players in the business.

"Seattle is probably the No.1 city for casual games," said Michael Schutzler, senior vice president responsible for overseeing RealNetwork's casual games business. "There's more talent here than anywhere else."

A revenue stream

Casual games have been around for quite some time. The Solitaire game that has come packaged with Microsoft Windows since 1990 is a perfect example. A world-class stealer of spare time, the famed game was written by Seattle resident Wes Cherry.

"Casual games were the first thing most of us played as we were growing up," Microsoft's Early said. Nonetheless, he said casual gaming has been enjoying a sort of renaissance in recent years.

"The biggest change over the last few years is that the casual games industry has started to generate real revenue," said Alexis Madrigal, a games industry analyst with research firm DFC Intelligence.

Madrigal predicts the North American casual games market will generate $458 million in revenue this year, compared with $314 million last year. Worldwide, the biz is expected to bring in $953 million this year.

Seattle-based RealNetworks jumped into casual games almost six years ago. At the time, the company was known primarily for distributing media software online. Schutzler says they realized games could be distributed online as well. But RealNetworks struggled in the beginning as it tried to sell games that appealed to more serious players.

Then, "Someone had the crazy idea of, 'Well, let's try some puzzle games,' " Schutzler said. "Nobody thought it was going to work, but they tried some games and, lo and behold, they sold really, really well."

Since then, casual games have become a vital part of RealNetworks' business. In the first quarter of this year, they generated $18.6 million in revenue -- a 53 percent increase over the first quarter of 2005.

Not willing to remain a mere distributor of other people's titles, RealNetworks spent $35.6 million in 2004 to buy much-respected Seattle developer GameHouse. Last year it paid $15 million for Mr.Goodliving, a Finnish company that specializes in delivering games to cell phones. And in February, it spent $21 million to acquire Zylom Media Group, a distributor, developer and publisher of PC-based casual games in Europe.

It's hard to pinpoint what it is that makes these simple games so increasingly popular, not to mention spectacularly addictive. Take Bejeweled for example. A groundbreaking hit from Seattle's PopCap, it has sold more than 10 million units since its introduction in 2001, making it one of the best-selling computer games of all time.

Garrett Link, director of GameHouse, which is responsible for hits such as Text Twist and the Super Collapse series, remembers in 2001 when customers were downloading a few thousand games a day. These days, GameHouse, in conjunction with the RealArcade service, is seeing more than 750,000 games downloaded daily.

Players usually explain the appeal this way: "It's a really easy way to take a little break," said new mom Fisher, who only plays games these days when her daughter Luna is sleeping. "They don't require a big commitment. You can start and stop whenever you want." She also points out that casual games "make you feel smart. You feel like you can beat the game in a pretty short period of time."

"These games have to be fun," said David Roberts, CEO of PopCap. "They have to be very approachable. You have to be able to get it and start playing right away and not get frustrated."

"The good ones," Schutzler pointed out, "keep you coming back again and again."

The bottom line

"Casual games are so much better now than they were five years ago," said Joel Brodie, president of GameZebo.com, an editorial site dedicated to reviewing and previewing casual games.

As audiences have grown increasingly sophisticated, developers have begun creating games with more depth and higher production values. Brodie estimates that companies such as PopCap would have made a game like the original Bejeweled for $20,000 back in the early days. Now, he said, they're dropping between $100,000 and $150,000 to develop new titles.

Still, casual games remain appealing to businesses because they cost far less to make than the typical hard-core game, which, much like a movie, can cost millions.

Companies make money from casual games in a variety of ways. Games offered free on the Web often come with advertising placed around them or even inserted as part of the games themselves. Many companies offer a try-before-you-buy model in which a person can play a limited version of the game on the Web for 60 minutes, but then must pay about $20 to download the full version to their PCs.

Some companies also use a subscription model. Pogo.com, for example, allows gamers to play free on its site or join Club Pogo for an annual fee of $35. Club Pogo membership gives players access to full versions of all the games plus some exclusive titles in addition to a variety of bonus features that emphasize community and socializing.

"Pogo is more about collaboration than it is about competition," said Andrew Pedersen, executive producer for Pogo, a division of game giant Electronic Arts. "Our business is primarily focused on online gaming and building those communities and social networks that keep people engaged."

Community-building features are proving to be a big draw when it comes to casual games. Club Pogo's paid membership jumped from 500,000 to more than a million subscribers in a year's time, Pedersen said.

Debra Dennis, a 54-year-old retiree and widow from Tacoma, is one of those subscribers. She loves playing Texas Hold 'Em Poker with other visitors to the Pogo site. Her son, Kristopher, recently joined the club. Currently serving a tour of duty in Iraq, he figured Pogo's online community would be a good way to stay in touch with his mom.

"We play Texas Hold 'Em and a new game called Shuffle Bump together," Dennis said. "He might not be able to call me, but when he can get online I can see him and know he's OK."

Casual games want you

While casual games have been played primarily on PCs in the past, these little programs are making major inroads into the mobile domain and are now appearing even on the kinds of machines previously aimed at more serious gamers.

Microsoft has had great success with Xbox Live Arcade, a service that brings a bevy of casual games to the Xbox and Xbox 360 -- the company's powerful gaming consoles.

More than 4 million games have been downloaded from Xbox Live Arcade since the November Xbox 360 launch. The digital version of the old Uno card game has proved an especially big hit.

Meanwhile, Nintendo is hoping to lure new players into the fold with its new casual-style Touch Generations games. Titles such as Brain Age and Big Brain Academy -- playable on the portable Nintendo DS -- are packed full of quick, brain-teasing puzzles designed to stimulate healthier brain activity.

Nintendo of America Vice President Perrin Kaplan said there's a whole segment of consumers who used to play video games but walked away from the pastime as their lives got busier and games became increasingly complex and time consuming.

The Touch Generation games are "easy for people to pick up, learn something new, challenge themselves mentally and then put back down," she said. "It fits into people's lives."

When Nintendo launches its new Wii console later this year, it will introduce a machine it hopes will appeal to both non-gamers and those who gave up gaming. The small, stylish, user-friendly console will include a motion-sensitive controller designed for the most intuitive game play possible.

Play Wii Sports: Tennis, for example, and rather than try to figure out how to press a bunch of buttons and triggers, you'll simply swing the controller as you would a racquet to bat around a virtual tennis ball right there in your living room.